works of wanderlust

Month: September 2025

  • weekend wrap, seventeen

    Ahh… one short.

    This should have been my eighteenth weekend wrap. How crazy would have that worked out!?

    I have been feeling all the feels this last week because as I write this my daughter is off to school on her eighteenth birthday. All grown up and my legal obligations as a parental unit caregiver done, I now get to lean back and consider what remains of the moral obligations and how to navigate being the parent of an adult.  So weird.

    This weekend was busy in relation to all that.

    Friday I added to my rewatched list My Neighbour Totoro, one of the more famous of the Ghibli films, a list that got a little bit more important since we officially scored tickets to the Japanese park in a few months. Refreshing the sights and sounds of these films in my head will add to the enjoyment of the visit, I presume.

    Saturday rolled in and The Kid (I guess it was the last weekend I can call her that, huh?) and I scooted over to Starbucks. She had an essay to work on. I had my regular writing vibe going on. Her fancy coffee cost literally three times as much as mine. Yikes.

    The in-laws showed up unexpectedly with the intention of taking The Kid for a pre-birthday lunch, so we tagged along for that. It was more a brunch, by her request, which only means I trained her well enough these las eighteen years to respect the most important meals of the day.

    We scooted over to West Edmonton Mall for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. We’re not casual shoppers, to be honest, so it was more a mission trip to find The Kid her birthday gift. I wandered and took photos and met the gals back at the bubble tea store.

    Following a dinner of sushi from the mall, we trekked downtown to start the theatre season. We are seasons tickets holders for the Citadel and our first play of 25/26 was an adaptation of Life of Pi, which was phenomenal. 

    Sunday I led the crew on a twelve klick run. I am officially in training for my race in a little over a month, which means inching my distance back up to a ten miler equivalent. It’s completely do-able, it’s just been a few months since I’ve run more than ten klicks. Autumn was definitely showing its colours.

    The Kid had a friend over to watch a movie for her class, so I went for a stroll and bought the ingredients for my gag gift for her eighteenth. Where we live, eighteen is the age of majority which means she can technically buy booze and cannabis and vote and gamble, all legally. I bought her some scratch tickets and a bottle of the most barely-a-wine wine I could find and a goofy card. Oh, dad.

    I made dinner and we cleaned up and settled into a chill evening. Our last evening as parents of a “kid” was spent doing the most parent of things: sitting on the couch, watching tv, helping her with her homework, and going to be at a reasonable hour. 

  • code monkey, one

    I have been writing code for nearly as long as I have been using computers—which, ugh, it sparks my nostalgic angst fuse to write it but that was in grade school in the nineteen eighties. 

    To that point, I have been coding increasingly more and more these last few years, and making more and more meaningful tools in code.

    I thought it was high time I started a reflective series of posts on the topic. 

    Oh, sure, you can toddle on over to one of my other blogs and read about the intricacies of my coding efforts when I choose to write about them. I am specifically referring to my game development blog where I was for a while simul-writing about the creative processes behind indie game design—but bluntly those posts tend to get into coding and design weeds quite deeply and are not everyone’s cup of joe. 

    Code monkey, part one then—and it begins with a wistful reflection on the recent overhaul of my Microfeed Applet. 

    Three years ago I was livid.

    I was so damn sick of the broken-ass nature of social media I set out to divest myself of participation on the platform which I had once loved and cherished, but which had betrayed my trust: Instagram.  Doesn’t that sound weird, to confess such adoration for a social media platform? Well, it was once a triumphant tool of personal expression and sharing. I could make comics or photos or art and spread them to friends and the world. It was like perfect digital self-publication tool made real and easy.  But those damn platforms do as those damn platforms are wont to do: they blurred the notion of customer and user and suddenly I noticed that I was no longer a customer, but just another user who flailed about in algorithmic hell of lost potential. 

    In reaction and protest, I wrote some code to upload my photos and text to my own server: 8r4d-stagram, I called it.  It kinda looked like a rudimentary version of Instagram, which back then was the whole point: if they are going to fuck up their platform, then I can just make my own. I can code personal projects, and it’s not like I was going to sell it so who cares how or who or what I replicated? 

    We went to New York a couple weeks later and there I used the new little photo posting system every day to post pictures from our trip. It was clunkier than Instagram, to be sure. Of course it was. It was essentially a home-brewed, web-based, beta-version of a billion dollar platform. It could never compete in real life, but it was good enough for me—and I took a lot of notes on what worked and what didn’t. QA on the fly, on the road.

    That was nearly three years prior to writing this post. In those years I have tweaked and improved the tool in fits and bursts, but improved it nonetheless. I have extended it, adapted it, fine tuned it and overhauled the guts of how it worked inside. I have added features, removed some of them days or weeks later, enhanced security, broadened the flexibility and made it work so much better than it did during that trip to New York trial period. 

    Code, after all, is one of those iterative efforts. A thing you make might never be done, so long as you can think of new ways of bending and blurring what you are trying to make it do, but then you can update it and improve it. That’s the joy.

    I have built hundreds of little programs over the decades, but only a handful have amounted to anything more than toys. My Microfeed Applet is one of those that has become in its own right so much more than a throwaway project.

    The last couple of weeks I have put my head back into the code and worked to push it even closer to maturity and even further from a simple Instagram clone. I reskinned the design. I added a menu system. I fine-tuned the back end code that you’ll never see but removes even more of the “clunk.” I refined the usability. All of this is not just in anticipation of another vacation trial period and me taking the tool to Japan to post our adventures in a few months, but because I am an iterative code monkey-type who thrives on continuously improving his tools, sharpening his blade, and enhancing his own skill. I use it. I learn from making it.

    And now that I have over a thousand posts on my own faux-social site, every code tweak it makes it easier to keep using it and not go back to broken-ass platforms.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • head over feets, nine

    Training is whatever you make of it. I’m sure there are some strict rules for pros and people with hard core goals, but for a guy pushing fifty who’s been doing this running thing for nearly two decades, I’m still just making it up.

    I mention this because one of my current run crew pals is training for one of those “how many laps can you do in such and such a time” races. It’s in an old mine shaft in the mountains, and I suspect (because I’ve never done one of those) half of the training for that repetitive grind is mental. She logged twenty klicks yesterday doing sixty laps of (literally) the parking lot. And this is amazing if for no other reason than it is kind of min/maxing the whole training mentality, trying to be very analytical about check-boxing the training plan. And I hope it works. 

    But for me, lately, it has simply been getting time on feet—which I’ve been pretty poor at for the months leading into this latest foundation-building streak.

    It’s been a busy few days because of that… 

    I capped off the week with late-morning Friday run, finally getting a chance to try the new bone conduction wireless headphones I’d scored off the reward miles site. They are solid enough for my purposes, and waterproof for swimming. That will be my next big test. I logged about five klicks in the heat.

    Saturday I went and did Park Run. I started my streak with a Park Run two weeks back and probably would have ended it with a feeling-good sub-thirty 5k, but …

    Sunday was the annual Terry Fox Run in Red Deer so we drove down there to help out and participate. I mostly did the participating part, running (pretty much) two laps for a solid 9k run. I say “pretty much” because (a) the course was a too-short 5k out and back so I never would have hit 10k, and (b) when I was in sight of the start/finish/second lap, I had this feeling that my motivation was sinking enough to call it quits at, well, let’s just call it 4.8km, which is bad for a few reasons, not the least of which is it is short of my 5km minimum for a streak day, so I turned back a hair early and did a second lap without crossing the “official” line. But the whole thing was kind of an honour system race anyhow and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to muster much honour for a second lap if I strictly followed the made up rules anyhow.

    Speaking of streaks, I ran for sixteen consecutive days and logged about 100km in that span. I’m now at a crossroads because my work-back training plan for my race in October has me increasing distances starting next Sunday. This is a wee bit incompatible with the grind that is a streak, so I think I’m calling it today. I ran sixteen days in a row, started with a solid Park Run, ended with a Terry Fox Run, and logged a century. None too shabby. Now, as of Monday morning, time for a few days of rest (and hopefully some swimming) and I’ll get back at the training-proper for my October race.

    Reminder: Blogs are not a replacement for professional advice. Please read my note on safety and safe participation.

  • weekend wrap, sixteen

    September is in full swing and half over as I write these words. It’s always so quaint to not only be surprised by the passage of time, but then to write about it as if anyone reading those words isn’t even further into the future and looking back wishing it were only the middle of September 2025 and not whenever they are.

    The weekend passed in a bit of blur so this may be a short recap.

    Friday, we chilled after a long week back to the normalcy of routine. The school year season, as much as it is now defined by semesters of university I suppose, began anew, and we all had classes and clubs and lessons that kicked into gear again last week, so an evening on the couch was not a terrible idea. 

    I have been refining my code for my *other* site, a “gram-ish” blog over at 8r4d.com/p which is what I built initially to post less on social media, but is all one big hand-coded bespoke CMS project. I mention it, because starting on Friday night I sat there with a computer open squashing a few more bugs and fine-tuning the code a little more. It’s been in the works for three years but is all one fairly mature product these days.

    Saturday I got up and ran Park Run. Sub-thirty for a five klick run, so my running streak (hitting fifteen days on Saturday) was paying off. 

    And then I was struck with the negatives of contracting work, because lacking a better plan I spent a few hours on the contract puzzle I had been left with on Friday afternoon post-sending a status update to my client.

    Our evening wrapped up at the Jube. Karin and I had tickets to a comedy show called The Stand Up for Canada tour, hosted by none other than Rick Mercer. It was two hours of patriotic date night laughs.

    Sunday was spent mostly in Red Deer. We got up, packed up, and drove south. The mother-in-law has been deeply entrenched on the organizing committee of the local Terry Fox run, and so we go down and help and/or run. This year I mostly just did the running part, making it day sixteen of my running streak. (And I think it may be the one to cap it off with so I can focus on properly training and not draining.)

    After a lunch in Red Deer we drove home, did the weekend grocery shopping and spent the rest of the evening chilling on the couch again. There’s only so much energy to go round these days, huh?